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Searching the Scriptures, Finding Christ in the World” Daniel D

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Searching the Scriptures, Finding Christ in the World” Daniel D “Searching the Scriptures, Finding Christ in the World” Daniel D. Shin This paper addresses John Wesley’s thoughts on the connection between the means of grace and the renewal of the heart for the flourishing of humanity, transformation of the church, and missional engagement in the world in light of Hans W. Frei’s work. It begins with a brief discussion about Wesley’s sermon “The Means of Grace” focusing on the practice of searching the Scriptures and how it relates to the proper ends of religion understood as the love of God and neighbors.1 This is followed by Frei’s critique of Wesley’s approach to the Bible that makes the Christian journey its overarching interpretative framework. To shed light on Frei’s critique, his work on theological hermeneutics, Christology and ecclesiology, and theological method is addressed identifying along the way the three movements in the making of a public spirituality, namely, incorporation, refractive enactment, and correlation. Having clarified the promise of Frei’s work toward public spirituality, then the paper concludes with some observations about both convergences and divergences between Wesley and Frei on reading the Scripture, the social character of Christianity, and the use of third order discourse. In the sermon “The Means of Grace,” John Wesley expresses a grave concern about the use of the ordinances and in doing so points to the perennial issue involving the relation between the inward and outward dimensions of the Christian faith. One the one hand, he addresses those who had mistaken the means for the end and abused them, thus failing to realize the express goal of religion to “conduce the knowledge and love of God.” They were going through the motions alright but there was something missing. In their confusion, they depended solely on the outward means without the inherent power of the Spirit. Wesley reminds them that it is God alone who is the giver of every good gift, the author of all grace after whom they should seek. In fact, God can give grace without the means, a point Wesley makes by pointing to Christ’s work of reconciliation as the only means by which we are united with God. On the other hand, Wesley also has in mind the Moravians and other quietists who had regarded outward observances as superfluous and did not keep them. What mattered to them was the baptism of the Spirit which superseded water baptism and other sacraments. They took outward religion to be absolutely nothing, condemned it as unprofitable, and thereby deprived themselves of the means of grace. Wesley points to the inward emphasis of their spirituality and says that they wrongly imagined 1 that “there was something in them wherewith God was well-pleased.”2 He concedes that the means of grace was not about the elements themselves, which he describes as “weak and beggarly,” “a poor, dead, empty thing,” and “a dry leaf, a shadow,” and yet it is to their objections against the ordinances that Wesley addresses a rebuttal in favor of using all the means of grace. And directed to both at the opposite ends of the spectrum, that is, abusers and despisers, Wesley exhorts the use all the means of grace, especially prayer, searching the Scriptures, and receiving the Lord’s Supper, to seek God and God alone. Christians are to actively use the means of grace to receive God’s grace that grants health and renewal of soul in righteousness and holiness, which Wesley defines in no uncertain terms as loving the Lord and loving neighbors by attending to the matters of law, justice, and mercy. Incorporation To explore further Wesley’s straightforwardly clear argument that the relation between the means of grace, such as searching the Scriptures, and the very telos of Christian faith, the twofold love of God and neighbor, is an integral one, we turn to Frei’s thoughts on theological hermeneutics and its significance for the Christian life. Albeit too brief but poignantly, Frei addresses Wesley’s and the early Methodists’ use of the Bible in his historical investigation of modern theological hermeneutics in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.3 His criticism of Wesley is reflective of his overall thesis that in modern interpretations of the Scripture the meaning of biblical narrative became separated from its form and it was overshadowed by external frameworks of meaning and truth. He does not deny that Wesleys and Whitefield maintained their objective belief in the redeeming death of Christ and its efficacy, but the problem was that the bond between the meaning of the Scripture and its cumulative narrative depiction became rather loose and tentative because the journey of the Christian person from sin through justification and sanctification to perfection is made front and center. This shift in hermeneutical sensibility was buttressed by a misuse of figural interpretation, a critical feature of realistic narrative reading. Figural reading operates by maintaining the integrity of the figure in its own place, time, and right, without any dehydration of reality it prefigures, and then bringing together each present occurrence and experience into a real, narrative framework or world so that each person and event is a figure of that providential 2 narrative. As such, all human experience belongs in a real world with full density. However, Frei thinks that that relation is reversed in evangelical piety so that while the atoning death of Jesus is real, necessary, and efficacious, the atoning redeemer is at the same time a figure or type of the Christian’s journey, which is the overarching narrative framework that defines the applicative sense of the cross. Frei writes, “What is real and what therefore the Christian really lives, is his own pilgrimage; and to its pattern he looks for the assurance that he is really living it.”4 What he is advocating is that we should read the Bible in such a way that we are incorporated into the world of biblical narrative, rather than fitting the world of biblical narrative into another world of our own making. To better appreciate Frei’s assessment of Wesley’s use of the Bible, we turn to his narration of the great reversal in modern theological hermeneutics. Frei’s thoughts on incorporation is deeply influenced by Erich Auerbach’s magisterial work Mimesis. Auerbach writes, Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.… Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world … must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan.5 The scriptural world is the primary world that absorbs or subjects the reader by exclusively defining that reader’s understanding of the world and the task of interpretation is about fitting one’s contemporary world into the imperialistic world of the Bible.6 Frei then explains how this incorporation of the reader and public world takes place through the major features of realistic, history-like narrative reading of Scripture. First, the reader takes biblical stories literally as describing real, historical occurrences in the world. Second, through the interpretive method of figuration or typology, the reader unites the various stories in the Scripture into a cumulative, chronological continuity. And third, this narratively rendered world encompasses the present age and the reader, so that the appropriate hermeneutical response is to fit oneself into that world by figural interpretation.7 Figural interpretation is, then, an effective hermeneutical strategy not only to give a sense of cumulative and chronological unity in intra-textual reading but also to fit extra- textual realities of the contemporary world into the world of the biblical story. Through such hermeneutical moves, the world of the biblical narrative emerges as the only real world that incorporates the entire history of humanity within its construction of the divine providence.8 3 Prior to the dawn of the modern world, realistic, history-like narrative interpretation was the common practice in the Christian, and Frei provides a tour de force historical-literary analysis of modern theological hermeneutics, which will not be rehearsed here other than to briefly describe the great reversal.9 It is worth noting that the exegetical practices of the Protestant Reformers Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) which Frei heralds as good examples of realistic, history-like narrative interpretation. Both Luther and Calvin accepted the primacy of the literal sense understood as the grammatical-historical sense which was supplemented by figural or typological interpretation. Of particular interest to Frei is that they maintained the unity between the explicative sense and the historical reference in narrative depiction that rendered a world into which the readers were incorporated. He observes that reality representation through realistic, history-like narrative is not necessarily history with substantiated verification, but is like history due to its descriptive character that renders historical reality; hence, they are not identical but not of different realities. What makes a writing realistic or history-like is the occurrence character and the cumulative pattern of meaning.10 In the post-Reformation era, this unity between the meaning of biblical narrative and its form begins to disintegrate in the hands of different philosophical and theological schools of thought over several generations including the Pietists, Naturalists, , Supernaturalists, Deists, Rationalists, Idealists, covenant theologians, history of salvation school, Neologians and Latitudinarians, and Mythophiles among others. While the specific hermeneutical trajectories they developed are significant in their own right, a far more profound issue that underlies the breakup of the bond between narrative form and meaning is the impingement of external frameworks of meaning, epistemology, and language on biblical narratives.
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